Alan Piper

Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture Volume 6—Issue 2 July 2013 pp. 175–198 DOI: 10.2752/175169713X13589680082172

Abstract:

A novel published in 1933, describes the isolation of a hallucinogenic drug from an ergot-type fungus. It remarkably predates the discovery the hallucinogenic properties of the ergot-derived alkaloid lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) by ten years. It also identifies ergot as the secret psychoactive sacrament of the ancient mysteries forty years before this hypothesis became a matter of academic and scientific investigation. In the novel, a central character plans to use an ergot derived drug as an agent of popular religious renewal, prefiguring the New Age religious revival initiated by the popular use of LSD. The story involves the mass testing of a hallucinogenic drug on the unsuspecting inhabitants of an isolated village almost twenty years before the Pont St Esprit incident of 1951, which has been ascribed to the CIA’s plans for experimental dosing of unsuspecting civilians with psychoactive drugs. This article investigates how the author could have managed to foresee these future events in such prophetic detail and reveals the sources that were available. In this article the history of psychoactive drugs is set in the context of the political, scientific, literary, and philosophical culture of the interwar period and shows that the cultural history of psychoactive drugs is enhanced by such context.

Excerpt from page 184-187: 

"Leo Perutz and the Secret

History of LSD

The literary and intellectual world of Vienna, of which Perutz was a part, was influenced by various currents of occult philosophy, which emerge in the work of writers, artists, and composers of the time.

It was a world in which Theosophy, Anthroposophy, Pythagoreanism, astrology, clairvoyance, numerology, and other forms of occult belief played roles—and at times important roles—in the lives of some of the same figures who appear so often in writing about fin-de-siécle Vienna. (Covach 1998)

When | first read St Peter's Snow | wondered if Perutz, through occult currents of thought flowing through his cafe society contacts, had been a party to a secret tradition with knowledge of a psychoactive sacrament derived from ergot. The idea that just such a secret tradition has persisted through the ages is a central proposition of the work of Dan Merkur and Carl Ruck. Dan Merkur has demonstrated its persistence

in the Jewish mystical tradition and Perutz shows his familiarity with the Jewish mystical tradition in his final work, By Night under the Stone Bridge (1991).

For over ten years Mark Stahlman has been making occasional web postings concerning his take on the secret history of psychedelics. Mark's secret history is summarized on a tribe.net posting and its core contention is that knowledge of ergot's medicinal and psychoactive powers have been known from prehistory and its use as an initiatory agent in mystery religions was passed down by some of the usual suspects in the heretical and hermetic traditions, the Illuminati, the Freemasons, and also certain orders within the Roman Catholic church. Later, the thread is picked up by groups associated with fin de siècle neo-romantic paganism and neo-Gnosticism. (Those interested should check out Stahlman’s full account of his hidden history, which can easily be found on the internet: http://tribes. tribe.net/ethnobotany/thread/5a0356c2b|79-45b4-a6a | -a5ea44e0f36f,)

More recently Stahl man has quoted Willis Harman, from an interview in 1977 (Fry and Long 1977), concerning the hidden history of LSD. According to Harman:

The story really starts way back in 1935 with a group of followers of the German mystic Rudolf Steiner who lived in a village Southern Germany. In 1935 a dark cloud was over Europe so the members of this group set out deliberately to synthesize chemicals which were like the natural vegetable substances which they were well aware had been used in all the world's major religious traditions down through the centuries. By 1938 they had synthesized psilocybin, LSD and about thirty other drugs. Then they stopped to think about the consequences of letting all of this loose, and decided against it.

They decided that they were not sure what the negative effects of the drugs would be and that it just wasn’t a very wise thing to do. Five years later in 1943, when Europe was really in bad shape, they decided apparently that possible negative consequences were nothing compared to the consequences of not doing this.

Now, two members of this group, which ived in a very tight religious community, were in the Sandoz chemical company— that’s partly how this project came to be. One of them was the chemist Dr Albert Hofmann. He cooked up the newspaper story that everyone has heard now, about the accidental ingestion of LSD and the realization of what its properties were after an amazing bicycle ride home and the visions and so on. This group quietly gave supplies of the chemical to a number of doctors around the world—in Europe and the United States and Canada—and tried to explain to them what it was they were on about. (Fry and Long 1977)

These are extraordinary claims and as Carl Sagan said “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.’ Unfortunately it seems that at least one element of this story is unlikely, which is that “by 1938 they had synthesized psilocybin” because although twentieth-century awareness of the contemporary use of psychoactive mushrooms in Mexico surfaced by the 1920s, the mushrooms were only identified as Psilocybe species in 1957 and psilocybin identified as the main active component in |958—unless this is another cover story.

Where could Willis Harman have got such information? Willis Harman (19 18-97) was a mover and shaker in the highest circles of sophisticated psychedelic and New Age circles of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s and might have had many sources. However, in an Interview with Martin Lee, co-author of a social history of LSD, Acid Dreams, this information is attributed to one Al Hubbard, a mysterious figure who moved in the same high society of psychedelic culture as Harman and who had intelligence connections going back to the Second World War (Lee 1988/9). Compared to Hubbard, Willis Harman was a “Johnny Come Lately” to the world of psychoactive drug research. If someone was likely to have knowledge of any secret history of LSD it was Willis Harman's friend and associate Alfred M. Hubbard. Hubbard graduated in the 1920s from bootlegger to government agent, to secret agent as a member of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

The OSS was a US intelligence agency created in 1940 at the beginning of the Second World War. The OSS investigated the potential of various “truth drugs” for interrogation purposes from as early as 1941 and these included sodium amytal, cannabis, and peyote. It appears likely that Hubbard graduated from government agent to the OSS early in the Second World War. Government investigative agencies were a fertile recruiting ground for the OSS. After the Second World War those involved in this research recruited former Nazi doctors who were involved in the same kind of experimentation in Nazi Germany.

It is unlikely that much of the history of psychoactive drug research would have escaped the attention of the Nazis. Stahlman’s claims have a broad credibility in that the European neo-pagan and neognostic movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and esoterically inclined freemasonry, which looked to ancient mystery traditions for inspiration, may well have explored drug-induced states. Experimentation with mind-altering drugs was common in fin-de-siécle and earlytwentieth-century literary and artistic circles, as evinced in H.H. Ewers essay on “Art and Intoxication” published in a German literary and political journal in 1909 (Ewers 1906). It is also significant that, in the late nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century, Germany led the field in mescaline research and ethnological researches in South America including amongst those indigenous groups using peyote"